


What I Know Now

by LadyStrangeandUnusual (Dream_Wreaver)



Category: Beetlejuice (1988), Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: F/F, Linkage of the Three Universes, Past Lives, Reunion, universe reset
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21979729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dream_Wreaver/pseuds/LadyStrangeandUnusual
Summary: Miss Argentina remembers very little from the time she was alive. She remembers even less from her time being dead. But she still remembers someone, it just isn't the same woman she thought she once knew.
Relationships: Miss Argentina | Receptionist/Juno
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	What I Know Now

**Author's Note:**

> This has actually been sitting in my finished stuff for a little while, so I decided to polish it up and post it. This was written for a special friend of mine but the ideas I put together have kept me interested and I have more I'm gonna play around with so enjoy!

Miss Argentina had found that existence after death was perhaps worse than life itself. She didn’t know what she’d been hoping for when she’d opened those matching gashes in her wrists, but it hadn’t been an eternity of civil servitude under the bureaucracy of the dead. And what was worse, this all felt strangely familiar to her. Even putting the blade to flesh, something about it had seemed familiar. But not familiar enough to prevent her from doing it. And then she’d been dead, entered the Netherworld, and met Juno. Juno, who was the scariest demon in the bureaucracy. Juno who spoke so derisively about her own son in his presence and out. And she was forced to work under the woman.

Worse still, were the flashes she sometimes got. Memories of another time, another place, another woman with silver hair and a slit throat. One who wore gray business suits and spoke with a stern, no nonsense attitude. One who Miss Argentina felt a strange yearning for whenever the woman appeared in her minds eye. The memories would come unbidden, whenever she entered Juno’s office. The abyss of the Netherworld was a facade for the spirits, the truth was that it looked like a relatively normal office building with a grim and macabre sense of interior design. Instead of the demon lady with her blood red and blood stained suit, she saw the calm, collected woman with the curl in her hair that reminded her of an old flapper. The spot where her heart had once beat tugged painfully when the vision cleared to reveal her boss.

“Tina!” Juno would snap at her, “How many times have I told you not to stare off into space in the middle of my office?”

The voice was the same, but different. And so was the name. Tina, she’d ceased recalling her name from when she was alive, and everyone had shortened Argentina to simply Tina. but somehow, that didn’t seem to fit. She closed her eyes at her desk for just a moment and she heard it. That voice, stern but warm and affectionate whispering in her ear,

_ “Carmen,” _

Tina woke to find tears in her eyes. Tears from a body long rotted away. She’d never felt lonelier than with the feeling deep in her gut that once upon a time, she’d had someone here in death. Carmen, she’d been called Carmen once. By that lady with the silver hair and the cigarette in her hand. The lady called,

“Juno,” Tina whispered to herself. Juno. it was Juno. But it wasn’t. It just couldn’t be. Juno was nothing like that other woman. She was crotchety, and mean, and didn’t give a flying fuck about anyone except the rules of the Netherworld. She was a demon from Hell, not another ghost like her. There was nothing more to this, there just couldn’t be.

And then, came the girl. The girl and her father, looking for someone. But they were still alive. Special humans indeed, to be able to come to the Netherworld. And then she’d upset Juno. Living people weren’t supposed to come to the Netherworld. But if they were already here, they weren’t supposed to be able to leave. But Tina had felt pity for them, so she’d hidden them. The girl had said she’d been trying to escape being forced into marriage with Beetlejuice. Tina might have known, that poor boy was so lonely, and if he’d made a friend out of her he would have done anything to keep her.

But Juno had not been happy to find out the girl had escaped. Nor, that Beetlejuice had succeeded and married a living girl and had gained status as a breather. It was a problem she went to sort out herself. And then, a bell rang. In her entire tenure as Juno’s assistant Tina had only heard that bell ring once. Juno had said that some poor demonic schmuck hadn’t kept his nose out of Saturn and moved on with it. That bell signaled the death of a demon, somewhere in the universe. And then, the higher ups called her in.

The Powers that Be were a mysterious and enigmatic lot. They had their methods of doing things, and Beetlejuice was always throwing a wrench into their carefully laid plans. But not this time it seemed. Their office was a large shadowed room, with only a single spotlight shining down onto a small table. A seemingly innocuous manila folder was laid atop it. They indicated that Tina sit, and asked her what she knew about Beetlejuice, and Juno.

Tina tried to reply with all that she knew, but the atmosphere around her seemed skeptical of the truth of her words. They asked her if she thought Juno ever loved her son the way a mother should. Tina answered she’d never seen anyone as fueled with hatred towards a child for no reason as Juno was to Beetlejuice. They asked her if she remembered anything, flashes, snippets, something that she knew she hadn’t experienced and yet felt as though she had all the same. When she hesitantly told them no, they were silent a moment and then they asked her to open up the folder, and read the case file within.

It was Beetlejuice’s case file. But the information in it was different than what she knew. He had a real name, one that wasn’t Lawrence, and had lived a life in the middle ages before dying shortly after the Plague left his area. She saw his cause of death, and that he’d been assigned to a caseworker as her assistant. That caseworker was Juno, and the photo in the file had been the exact same woman Tina imagined seeing so many times before. She saw how the story went. Beetlejuice trying to marry a mortal named Lydia Deetz to escape death, of being eaten by a sandworm tamed by a woman named Barbara Maitland. Of how the Powers that Be had given him him a choice: penance or punishment. He’d chosen the former, and the universe had been reset.

This Beetlejuice had met a child named Lydia Deetz and acted as her best friend for well over ten years. The Maitlands had been discarded, their existence seen as something of a detriment to a desired outcome. That Lydia Deetz had only had the self proclaimed ghost with the most as her closest confidant. Their co-dependence had been almost unhealthy, made them inseparable, but had made them stronger because of it. Then something had happened. Something had gone wrong. And whatever it was had caused Beetlejuice to go literally insane with anger and grief. He’d destroyed countless souls in his rampage and had only barely managed to have been restrained. And so the Powers that Be had given him a third chance.

This time, they stripped him of the one thing he’d had left to lose; his humanity. And in order to make sure things would proceed on the path they needed to they’d given him a guardian to look out for him. Juno. But this Juno had also paid the price. She too had been stripped of her humanity and turned into a demon, but the memories of who she had once been, who Beetlejuice had once been and what he had once done to her remained locked deep in her psyche. And that had caused bitter resentment to bleed into her treatment of him. But this time, Beetlejuice had succeeded. And as a small boon, the Powers that Be decided to once again intervene; bringing back who she had been once the Sandworm finished devouring what she had become. While Tina had an idea of who they meant, she wasn’t certain enough to hope it would be true. Fate was a fickle mistress, and hope gave her something to try and take from you.

With the calm and professional veneer she had developed working this job for so long Tina asked what all of this had to do with her, what they meant by Beetlejuice succeeding this time around, and what all this meant for the future. The Powers said they couldn’t quite divulge the reasons why, but that it had always been Beetlejuice’s fate to marry Lydia Deetz. That he had been denied twice before which threw the universe out of whack, and caused collateral damage in doing so. But by completing the ceremony, their souls had been irrevocably bound together, and things could now proceed in the manner they needed to. Tina had been collateral damage to resetting the universe twice, because it had caused her to lose someone she loved. And so, they would return this beloved to her. Miss Argentina felt the keen sensation of a heart stopping, even though hers had ceased beating long ago. No, they didn’t mean, they couldn’t mean, it was impossible that they knew!

“W-who?” she dared to ask, fingers clutching tightly to the manila folder like it was her only tether to the world of somewhat sanity and reality.

“Me,” came a voice. That same voice she heard during her idle moments during work, in her mind’s eye. And out from the shadows stepped that classy spirit with an arched brow, pursed lip, and cigarette smoke coming out the gash in her throat.

Tina couldn’t breathe. Her. It was  _ her _ , exactly as she remembered seeing her. Tina felt like she could cry. Juno, the  _ real _ Juno. Back here. Finally.

“Miss me Carmen?” Juno asked. Carmen, her name, the name Juno had always called her by between whispered conversations and stolen kisses in the woman’s office. Like a key fitting into a lock, her name was her memory. And her memories were back. Just like Juno. Juno,  _ her Juno _ , and Juno’s Carmen.

Miss Argentina sniffled, raising her hands to her lips for a moment as she softly gasped, “Mi amora!” and she raced from the table to embrace her beloved. Peppering kisses all over the woman’s face. Oh how she’d missed doing that! How she’d missed the scent of tobacco and faded perfume.

Juno broke away from the display of affection and cleared her throat, “Ahem, well, maybe we should take this outside, don’t you think?”

They exited the office, dismissed by their superiors. Carmen clung to Juno, so happy to have her and her memories back. But there was one problem, it seemed like they were the only ones. So what now?

“Well,” Juno shrugged, “I’m a new arrival, who needs to serve my civil sentence. And I was also supposed to tell you that with your boss gone… so to speak, they’re gonna promote you. You’ll be a full blown caseworker Carmen.”

How exciting! But what about Juno?

“So, while we have a moment of privacy… can I ask if you’re in need of an assistant?”

“Think I can show you the ropes ah?” Carmen teased, dropping a kiss at the shorter woman’s temple.

“I’ll have you  _ in _ ropes if you keep up the sass,” Juno snarked, taking another drag, “Now, I suppose we have one more order of business to take care of.”

“Which is?”

“Telling my dumb adopted son’s in-laws they’ve got an old problem, and his name is Beetlejuice.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought. Until next time Netherlings!


End file.
